PoloCountry Gentleman

Country GentlemanKey Looks

American sportswear, particularly that from the '20s to '40s, has always been about a unique mix of tailored and utility. For this collection, I called on that specifically American aesthetic and introduced unexpected combinations to create something that feels very modern.

—Ralph Lauren

Country GentlemanOuterwear

RL MagazineA Tale of Two Castles

Spend a night in one of these great American monuments to bygone wealth and opulence

During the Gilded Age, the time of the great robber barons and before the 1929 stock market crash, newly minted moguls built palaces as a celebration of their titanic achievements in business and finance. Many such palaces were abandoned following the Great Depression, with some eventually razed, but two spectacular specimens in New York—Oheka Castle on Long Island and the Castle Hotel and Spa in Tarrytown—survive to this day as luxury hotels. With the castles’ close proximity to New York City, they make for a fascinating weekend getaway for work-weary locals as well as a history-rich side trip for Big Apple tourists.

In 1914, when financier Otto Hermann Kahn set about building his home on the Gold Coast of Long Island, he wanted to live on the island’s highest point. So Kahn had mounds of earth hauled up to his Cold Spring Harbor compound, thereby artificially creating the apex of Long Island and making a kind of Mount Olympus for his majestic 109,000-square-foot summer home, which he named Oheka (a conjunction of his name). At the time, the second largest private residence in the United States (Kahn lost out to the Vanderbilts’ Biltmore Estate in North Carolina on that one), Oheka boasted 127 rooms for entertaining foreign royalty, heads of state and stars of the silver screen….

Country GentlemanSweaters

Style Report: Fall Layering

Country GentlemanSport Shirts

Vintage photographs of sporting enthusiasts at Cabin Bluff—a hunting and fishing retreat located along Georgia’s Cumberland River—served as an inspiration for the rich heritage feel of the Country Gentleman collection